The growing English language learner (ELL) population in the United States warrants an examination of reading intervention effectiveness with this population. The reading achievement of ELLs is of particular concern due to the importance of reading skills and the innate language barriers that exist for ELLs. This article reviews existing…

Although instruction has been shown to be effective at increasing vocabulary knowledge and comprehension, factors most important for promoting the acquisition of novel vocabulary are less known. In addition, few vocabulary studies have utilized models that simultaneously take into account child-level, word-level, and instructional factors to…

In some academic settings where English is not the first language it is nonetheless common for reading to be assigned in English, and the expectation is often that students will acquire subject terminology incidentally in the first language as well as in English as a result of listening and reading. It is then a prerequisite that students notice…

In this article, we report on a study that examined the active and receptive English vocabulary of two different groups of Grade 3 learners in South African township schools. The groups consisted of English Home Language (HL) learners in the Western Cape and Xhosa HL and English First Additional Language (FAL) learners in the Eastern Cape. The…

This study examined the effects of task types on English as a foreign language (EFL) learners' receptive and productive vocabulary knowledge. To this end, 130 (70 female and 60 male) EFL learners were randomly assigned to one of six tasks of learning 30 target words. The design of the tasks was based on the involvement load hypothesis (ILH)…

Research has shown that general vocabulary knowledge (e.g., Milton & Treffers-Daller, 2013), academic vocabulary knowledge (e.g., Townsend et al., 2012) and general intelligence (e.g., Laidra et al., 2007) are good predictors of academic achievement. While the effect of these factors has mostly been examined separately, Townsend et al. (2012)…

This article describes the importance of vocabulary knowledge in adolescents' reading comprehension, particularly for students with disabilities. Students with stronger vocabularies tend to have better background knowledge and improved understanding of content-area texts. We describe evidence-based vocabulary instructional practices that…

This study used a pretest-posttest-delayed posttest design at one-week intervals to determine the extent to which written, audio, and audiovisual L2 input contributed to incidental vocabulary learning. Seventy-six university students learning EFL in China were randomly assigned to four groups. Each group was presented with the input from the same…

In many low- and middle-income countries, young children learn a mother tongue or indigenous language at home before entering the formal education system where they will need to understand and speak a country's official language(s). Thus, assessments of children before school age, conducted in a nation's official language, may not fully reflect a…

Examining spoken features across proficiency levels allows researchers to explore the nature of speaking proficiency as it develops. This line of research has thus far primarily focused on adult second language (L2) learners. Using cross-sectional data based on a large-scale language assessment intended for young L2 learners, in this study, we…

Purpose: To date, there is no tool for assessing early pragmatic development of Polish-speaking children. This study aimed to adapt to Polish a standardized parent report measure, the Language Use Inventory (LUI; O'Neill, 2009, in order to enable cross-cultural comparisons and to use the LUI-Polish to screen for pragmatic development in children…

Video viewing can be a valuable resource to expose students to large quantities of input so they can improve their vocabulary and content comprehension. Most studies so far have used short clips and have not explored in much detail the effects of individual differences (IDs) such as aptitude, listening skills and vocabulary size. This paper aims…

Television is considered an important source of comprehensible input for second language learners of English and there is some evidence that L2 words can be learned incidentally by watching television. Few studies have looked at the role of TV viewing for learning formulaic sequences, despite the ubiquity of formulaic sequences in spoken English,…

The refugee influx in the European context has challenged national systems and individual higher education institutions to develop and iterate solutions for prospective and, increasingly, enrolled university students. In the German setting, enormous federal investment has supported a robust response, though one which in several aspects lacks…

This classroom discourse study examines how curriculum becomes a resource for identity performance in one ESL classroom. Conceptualizing identity as performance, I adopt a small stories approach to analyze how one routinized vocabulary instructional activity was appropriated by classroom participants to perform identities and construct the…